Dusklands

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“J.M. Coetzee’s vision goes to the nerve center of being.”—Nadine Gordimer

The revolutionary first fiction by Nobel Prize Winner, J.M. Coetzee

A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. “Vietnam Project” is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves. With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands.

2024 is the 50th Anniversary of the publication of DusklandsWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

“Intense, clear and powerful. The promise, so brilliantly fulfilled in his later work, is clear in this earliest novel.” —Daily Telegraph

“Coetzee’s vision goes to the nerve center of being” — Nadine Gordimer

“Its unflinching sense of loss, its claustrophobic acknowledgement of the unwilling interdependence of master and slave, and its subtle prose-style, make it an extraordinary achievement.”― Guardian

“His writing gives off whiffs of Conrad, of Nabokov, of Golding, of the Paul Theroux of The Mosquito Coast. But he is none of these, he is a harsh, compelling voice.” ― Sunday Times

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.US

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